The Next Right Step: From Teaching to EdTech

By Eva Brown

Educational technology (or EdTech) is transforming K-12 education, and teachers seeking a career change are taking notice. Today, more teachers than ever are considering a move from the classroom to a career in EdTech. Despite their qualifications and experience, however, many aren't sure where to begin.

 

As Eva Brown successfully moved from classroom teaching to the corporate world—first to a large educational publisher and then to a rising EdTech startup—she charted her own course. Since then, she has advised many other teachers on their own career paths. In The Next Right Step: From Teaching to EdTech, she offers the lessons of her experience to help you navigate your own career transition. Along the way, she answers such questions as:

• What are the pros and cons of working in EdTech?
• What positions should I consider?
• How will my classroom experience translate to the corporate world?
• How can I grow professionally (and build my resume) right where I am?
• How should I prepare for the interview?

Eva Brown's years of experience, practical advice, and relatable style make this book the ultimate guide for any educator seeking to break into EdTech. You can do it!

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eva Brown
• Release date: Dec 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393989776

Eva Brown

Eva Brown taught elementary and middle school and served as a literacy coach for over a decade before making the leap to the corporate world—first to large educational publishers and then to a rising EdTech startup. Since then, she has coached many other teachers on their own career paths. She currently lives in Florida with her husband and three children. Eva will always be a teacher at heart.

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Eva Brown has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks and registered trademarks of their respective owners. The author and publisher are not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. No company, product or vendor mentioned has partnered with the author, nor have they sponsored or endorsed the book, unless otherwise stated.

Copyright © 2021 Eva Brown

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 9781393989776

DEDICATION

To all teachers, who help children take the next step in learning every single day.

And to Jeff, for always being beside me as we take the next right step together.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to the many teachers who reached out to me to ask about EdTech.

You sparked this idea.

Thank you to the current and former colleagues who so graciously gave of their time to provide feedback and support.

Thank you to my husband, Jeff, and to Shefali Parekh, for being such fantastic editors. Any mistakes still found in this book must have been added after you reviewed the text!

But mostly, thank you to my family. I could not have done this without your sacrifices as you gave up many Saturday mornings and weekday evenings with me as I worked on this project. Thank you for believing in me.

I love you!

How Did You Get into EdTech, Anyway?

IN FEBRUARY 2021, MY InMail® message notification chimed. Hi Eva, I saw you were an Implementation Coordinator and would love to learn how you got started in your field and connect sometime. The writer was a teacher, someone I had never met before, who just happened to come across a post that I had shared about my new position. She continued, As a current teacher, what skills would you say would make me a successful candidate to get hired for a company like [yours] if you don’t mind me asking? Recently I had been asked the same question by some friends who were still in the classroom, so I set up an online session to answer their questions live.

The session was so lively and rich with questions that I decided to offer another one. I enjoy speaking with people and sharing my story, and the teachers were eager for knowledge. After having to pivot so many times during the past year, from creating take-home assignments to teaching virtually to returning to the classroom with masks, they seemed even more interested in answering the question of how else they might be able to use their skills and experience to impact students and education. I arranged for another session, limiting the capacity to 10 people to allow for conversation. I posted an open invitation, and within minutes, that session was full.

From there, the idea of this book was born. As questions continued to pour into my inbox from people I had never met before, I realized how hungry teachers were to learn how to take the next step into the business world when all their experience was in a classroom. The questions were always the same. How did I make the leap? What positions should they consider? How should they prepare for different positions? What are the salaries like? What are the pros and cons? There was often a tone of discouragement, with teachers sharing that they had been looking for months with no luck. There were so many requests to connect that I couldn’t possibly keep up with them all, but I read all the messages and mapped out the contents of this book so that I could share some answers not only with those who had already reached out but also those who were starting to wonder about possibilities beyond the classroom.

The thing is, I never planned to leave the classroom. From as far back as I can remember, my favorite game to play was school. During the warm, upstate New York summers, when the neighbors were available and willing, we would set up a classroom of sorts on one of our front porches. Whoever had prepared the most worksheets got to be the teacher, and it was almost always me. Initially we would copy each worksheet several times by hand, until I discovered carbon copy paper, which was a game-changer. I would make math sheets, reading passages, and science activities asking my students to determine which leaf matched which tree. I established classroom rules (1. Be on time; 2. Raise your hand to talk; 3. Don’t rub burdock in anyone’s hair). And I planned field trips to my favorite tree in the woods or gathering the smoothest rocks from the creek by their house to categorize as sedimentary, igneous, or metamorphic.

As summer turned to cool fall and everyone went back to real school, I turned my teaching attention to my Fisher-Price people, setting up the plastic one-room schoolhouse on my floor and arranging the plastic desk chairs into different configurations to see how I could best meet the needs of all my one-inch-tall students. I would beg my father, an actual science teacher, to let me grade his students’ tests until the advent of Scantron (which I secretly hated since it removed the necessity for my help.) I begged my own teachers to let me teach whenever I could, working out ways to explain two-digit by two-digit multiplication or the best strategies for learning to read.

I was born to teach.

As a college student, I majored in elementary education because my other interests were so varied that I couldn’t choose just one subject to focus on as a secondary education teacher. I didn’t want to teach just English or history or math—I wanted to teach all the subjects. I did my internships in primary classes in both the United States and England and loved every minute of it. I read every book I could find and watched every movie that was released that focused on teachers who changed students’ lives. My heroes were principal Joe Louis Clark, Laura Ingalls Wilder (for teaching so many different students in one classroom), Anne Sullivan, and Howard Gardner (who so perfectly captured what teachers already know – that every student is gifted in some way, and that school only measures some areas of gifting and intelligence.) And of course, the teacher who had changed my life – Mr. Ed Sharpe, my 8th grade health teacher, who helped me step out of anxiety and the fear of being bullied and step into a world of possibility, teaching me something that would never be measured on any state test.

As I transitioned from the college classroom to my own classroom, I worked with 28 squirmy second graders in a new charter school outside of Boston. It was there that I was introduced to Harry Wong’s The First Days of School, which probably saved me from quitting after the first year since college was filled with classes on educational theories and few on classroom management. Those first three years were challenging but reinforced the idea that I was born to teach. I loved teaching!

In 2000, I moved to Virginia and began teaching fourth grade. It was during my years there that No Child Left Behind became law, and although standardized testing had been a part of education for over three decades by that time, there was a new focus on making sure every student passed a state test. It was the same test for all my students, including Logan (name changed), who had been neglected and abused for his first nine years of life, witnessed the death of his sister at the hands of his abuser, and couldn’t write anything other than his own name. It was there that I learned that good intentions of political movements like No Child Left Behind do not always appreciate the true nature of the classroom. My goal for Logan that year was not to get him to pass a fourth-grade reading test; it was to help him heal and learn to trust so he wouldn’t flinch every time I walked by him, and to start him on his educational path by introducing him to letters and letter sounds. At the end of that year, he didn’t pass the test. But he did spontaneously hug me on his last day and declare, I love you, Miss Wilson.

I was born for that moment.

My years in the classroom continued as I taught fifth grade and then, after completing a master’s degree in teaching reading and moving to Florida, intensive reading to students just like Logan: 12–17-year-old students who couldn’t yet read. Some had severe learning disabilities, some had been incarcerated, some had been in and out of school as they moved with their migrant parents, and almost all were from incredibly poor families. I was a teacher who knew my students were highly unlikely to score proficient on the state reading test at the end of the year. They were starting at a kindergarten or first grade level and, therefore, it was near impossible for most of them to make 6–8 years of growth in one year. They were the bottom quartile, and my job, according to the state, was to show learning gains. Which they did. According to the state, I was a highly effective teacher.

Well, thank you for that.

In 2006, I was given the opportunity that changed the course of my future in education. I became a literacy/instructional coach in my county, working with middle school teachers across all content areas. In this role, I met Carol, an educational leader in my district. Working closely with her, I studied and read more educational research and books than I had since pursuing my masters, learning new reading theories, adult learning practices, and methods like backwards planning. I had the opportunity to visit dozens of classrooms, supporting teachers throughout my home school and district, and I designed professional development to help them learn the strategies that Carol was teaching me.

Carol left the district after another year or two when she was given an incredible opportunity to become the director of training for a large educational publishing company. But we kept in touch, and in 2010, she reached out to me to ask if I might be interested in doing some part time training for the company in schools and districts throughout the state around a specific reading intervention. We met for lunch, and she shared the program I would